Marina Hyde

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The US gymnast, who gave an electrifying victim statement face to face with her abuser in court, is now is now taking on the US Olympic CommitteeLast Friday, the multiple gold-medal winning US gymnast Aly Raisman delivered an electrifyingly powerful vi…

Permanent link to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2018/jan/24/aly-raisman-larry-nassar-horrors-gymnastics-usoc

Claim follows claim and now Chris Froome fails a drugs test. Fate is unkind to our premier cyclistsIt’s always exciting when something goes right down to the wire. And for many of us, the race to re-edit Chris Froome’s Sports Personality of the Year se…

Permanent link to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/15/chris-froome-affair-team-sky-champion-misunderstandings

Joe Root is light years away from the visibility David Gower enjoyed and, away from terrestrial TV, some team-mates in Australia might as well be in a witness protection programmeAt the risk of making myself a hostage to fortune, it is very possible th…

Permanent link to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/nov/22/bt-sky-england-ashes-unnameables

Maria Sharapova is back and her drug ban is receding into memory in a sport where the anti-doping procedure barely scratches the surface of a problem that is unlikely to be non-existent

In tennis, cleanliness is next to wealthiness. Announcing record levels of sponsorship deals back in 2015, the ATP chairman Chris Kermode explained: “People see [tennis] as a clean sport, it’s a great product with great athletes and I think tennis is in the best place it’s ever been.”

Why do people see tennis as a clean sport? The simple answer is that very few players ever test positive for banned substances. Except in faintly glamorous ways, like when Richard Gasquet ingested cocaine from kissing a lady all night in a Miami nightclub. Richard, you’ve tested positive for being a Mr Loverman.

Premier League referee’s come-and-get-me plea to the MLS or China displays all the hallmarks of being dictated by his agent, and after lunch at thatFunny to think that Mark Clattenburg inking a sponsorship deal while still a serving referee once felt l…

Permanent link to this article: https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2017/feb/15/mark-clattenburg-premier-league-referee-mls-china

Forget the beaches and the shopping, Major League Soccer is growing into something a lot more than a lifestyle option with a football contract attached

Clearly this is far from fashionable, but among my most detested of modern words are “pampering” and the indefensibly atrocious “wellness”. I don’t imagine this will have the wellness brigade crying into their kale daiquiris, but the world can be easily divided into people who would use the term “wellness”, and people with whom I should care to spend a second of time.

I don’t think I’ll ever warm to “lifestyle”, either, which conjures up showhomes with bar-stooled breakfast nooks, artist’s impressions of “retail experiences” that have yet to be built, and generally ignores the filthy magnificence of human existence in favour of a narcotising consumer advert for which you’re the mark. The Ski Yoghurt family – ask your parents, kids – had a definite lifestyle, and an advertising executive who had run the Ski account once explained to me that this was simply because they had to destroy the historically embedded idea that yoghurt was “a product only neurotic secretaries bought”.